Save the salmon -- and us

Recently, a photograph made its way to me on the Internet: In a surging Alaskan stream, a grizzly bear stands with a salmon in its jaws, and in the shallows, a wolf -- keeping its distance -- also hoists a thrashing salmon. Your eye goes to the bear, then the wolf. But the salmon convened the meeting. Without the salmon, you'd see only water.

When salmon return from the sea, their bodies are the ocean made flesh. Their tails propel ocean nutrients upstream and into forests, rivers and range lands, where they benefit hundreds of other species. Everything else in the photograph -- trees, bushes, all the animals and plants in the forest and the water -- contains ocean nutrients from salmon.

And now add orcas to the web of life fed by salmon. New research tells us that, before salmon hit the flowing streams, they are by far the most important food for resident killer whales along the Pacific Coast.

These killer whales, like wild salmon, are endangered. Of course the problems are connected: The fewer salmon, the fewer orcas.

Hope flared in early 2009, when the Obama administration's blueprint for Sacramento River salmon affirmed this salmon-orca connection and promised to put policies in place that would result in more wild salmon. It seemed like a strong first step in protecting West Coast salmon stocks.

But then two months ago, in a swift trick no one saw coming, the Obama administration embraced the Bush administration's failed salmon plan for an even more important watershed, the Columbia/Snake River system. The Columbia and its tributaries formerly produced more salmon than anywhere else on Earth, but the once-mighty rivers now have 13 salmon stocks in danger of extinction.

Federal scientists say this decline of Columbia/Snake salmon is the largest single change to the resident killer whale's food supplies. Yet the administration's Columbia plan seems to ignore that connection. While the Sacramento plan stated clearly that increasing wild salmon stocks is important -- for the whales and for people alike -- the Columbia plan contends that hatchery salmon will be enough to compensate for further losses.

The Obama plan adopts the Bush plan's legal and scientific analysis unchanged and in its entirety. It makes a few small tweaks elsewhere, but does not require anything that would actually save fish. The most "major" change calls for additional actions to be studied -- though not necessarily enacted -- if listed species continue to decline precipitously.